Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  “Come on, hit me!” the chairman shouted at the sheriff. “Give me a reason!”

  Bamonte stood and watched his neighbor for a few minutes; then his patience wore out. He grabbed the man by the head and squeezed. “You can’t stand around and watch that kind of stuff all day,” the sheriff said.

  BAMONTE EASILY WON a third term as sheriff in 1986, beating a former deputy. By then, he had learned that his energies and the rhythms of the county, while they often seemed incompatible, actually had much in common. Many people in the Pend Oreille expected to fail, expected things not to turn out, expected bad times, incompetence, broken hearts. Most homeowners seemed to cut twice as much wood as they would ever need for the winter, afraid to trust even the certainty of the following spring. Bamonte was just as prone as his neighbors to feel run over by the world. His troubles at home were mounting. In darker moods, which were becoming more frequent, he felt like a failure as a human being. Always there was the shadow of Bull, whom he idolized, and his mother, whom he despised. The traits of his parents came out in flashes of anger, fits of stubbornness, days of feeling unloved.

  He took refuge in the master’s project. But in studying the private notes and public travails of former sheriffs, Bamonte began to think of himself as an heir to the problems those men had left at their gravesides. And so rather than lessening his load, the master’s project added weight. In seeking help from the past, he picked up new responsibility. History was not a shrink, as he had hoped it would be, but a ghost.

  In early 1989, Bamonte was asking questions that had not been asked for decades. Nobody seemed to care what Black had found out about the shooting of Marshal Conniff, or whether this new information had any connection with Black’s fall from the bridge. Although Bamonte’s queries produced nothing new on Black’s death, he would not let up. He recorded each setback, a cop’s way of internalizing frustration.

  Alone with the past, Bamonte wrote:

  “Murder is a great tragedy, but to have no one care is greater still.”

  11.

  Metaline Falls

  AT NIGHT in the muffled refuge of Metaline Falls, Bamonte sat up with the old police files, looking for what Elmer Black had seen. Outside, snowdrifts piled up three feet and more, curling over shrubs and woodsheds, blanketing the industrial dust that covered the town. The cement factory groused through an evening shift. There was very little truck traffic through the village this time of year; the sounds that drifted up to Bamonte’s third-floor study came with the wind—an occasional barking dog, branches clawing against an icy window, a distant whine from the factory. Bamonte had written a brief history of the mining town, which once aspired to become the “Pittsburgh of the West” but now struggled to stay out of the register of ghost towns, its population 305 and sinking. Metaline Falls had come to life suddenly, born in the spontaneous rush to a freshly revealed mother lode, and now seemed to be aching through its final years. Young people left town as soon as they got out of high school, fleeing with the familiar lament of many small western towns, that there was no work, no future. The factory was laying off, cutting back purchases, letting things go to hell. A few routines—the Thursday-night cribbage game at the Western Star Tavern, fresh blackberry pies at the Hangout Cafe—held the community together.

  Bamonte knew all the swindling and whoring stories from the glory days of mining, when gold nuggets were scraped out of Sullivan Creek and the town mogul hired a team of prostitutes to recycle back to him the wages he paid his miners. On this winter night, as ice formed at the edges of the Pend Oreille River, Bamonte was looking for other voices and other stories. Elmer Black had died just after hearing from Charley Sonnabend, the retired Spokane detective who had conducted the initial investigation of the Conniff killing. Now, Bamonte found something about Sonnabend on a typewritten report, the paper faded to the color of beaver teeth. During an earlier sweep of county records, Bamonte had passed over this report; tonight, it revealed itself as if the type were throbbing neon. Not long after the Conniff case went dormant in 1935, Sonnabend left police work and returned to his first love, carpentry. He framed houses throughout Spokane, built with pine beams, sheathed in cedar. In the mid-1950s, Sonnabend—who carried nearly 300 pounds on a six-foot frame—had a massive heart attack. Lying on his back in a hospital room, Sonnabend thought he was going to die. He summoned to his bedside the United States marshal in Spokane, Darrell Holmes, a former Pend Oreille County sheriff. Sonnabend told the marshal he did not want to die without first revealing something that had happened during his last years as detective. The federal marshal called Pend Oreille authorities, who sent the retired Elmer Black and a prosecutor down to Spokane to hear the deathbed tale of Charley Sonnabend.

  On a late-winter day in 1955, near dusk, Sonnabend told the story he had kept to himself for twenty years. The carpenter talked for two hours. A summary of his revelations was contained in the memo that Bamonte found in the files. The top of the page read:

  STATEMENT OF CHARLES SONNABEND

  March 3, 1955

  Time: 4:00 p.m.

  Subject: Murder of George Conniff, Newport Marshal

  When Bamonte read the next paragraphs, even with their misspelled names, spelling inconsistencies, and grammatical roadblocks, his heart raced. Here is what he saw:

  Mr. Sonnobend gave this statement as to what he knew of the Conniff Murder. During that time which was back in the fall of 1935 there was a lot of creamery robbing going on. Mixed up in this was a fellow who was sent to the Federal Pen for interstate motor vehicle theft and after three weeks of questioning this suspect Acie Logan, he broke and admitted his part of the creamery robberys. He also put the finger on one of the City Detective’s as Clyde Roston who owned a ranch a short distance from Spokane. According to Logan there were several men connected to this ring of robbers but the stolen butter that was taken in these robberys was taken to the Roston Ranch and later disposed of through the Mothers Ketchen located on River side Street in Spokane. Mr. Sonnobend does not recollect just what the mans name was who was operating the cafe at the time. Logan also admitted to breaking into a box car and robbing it of shoes which was taken to the Roston ranch for later disposal. Logan also admitted robbing a wholesale house in Spokane of Ciggeretts, Cigars and Tobbaco which was disposed of through Mothers Ketchen.

  The night of the Conniff Murder the Spokane Police constructed a blockade at the north city limits and it was conducted by two rookie officers who told Sgt. Mangrin of the Spokane Police Department that they stopped a car which was boiling and hot and appeared as though it had been driven very hard and driving this car was Detective Roston. He and another person who we at this time don’t know.

  Roston was a very close friend of Acie Logan. Logan was the only man in the gang who could go direct to the Roston range. The two Officers at the blockade are not known at this time. Sgt. Mangrin retired from the police department in 1939. Mangrin knows all about this Murder and the affiliations of Roston and Logan. Roston is supposedly the ring leader.

  Bamonte sat upright, rubbed his eyes. He stood and paced the length of the room, talking to himself. Here was a possible answer—and a half-dozen questions—about a killing that had gone unsolved for fifty-four years. It all seemed so antique: a gang peddling black-market butter and stolen shoes, run out of a place called “Mothers Ketchen,” masterminded by a Spokane police detective. Who was this “Sgt. Mangrin”? And who was this “Roston”? The last name was vaguely familiar, a snippet of sound graffiti from the Stone Fortress.

  Bamonte felt an affinity with Marshal Conniff, like himself a log-cabin builder, a father, struggling to stay alive in the Pend Oreille. He thought of the marshal facedown in a puddle of blood in an alley next to the Newport Creamery. The building was still around, used now by the Fraternal Order of Eagles. Could it be he was killed by a police detective? Nobody would believe such a thing.

  The Sonnabend memo contained a few more telling details. The carpenter told of taking two guns
off Logan and his partners when he arrested them in the World Hotel. One of the guns in Logan’s possession had been previously signed out of the Spokane police property room by Detective Roston. The whereabouts of the pistols was addressed in the last line of the 1955 Pend Oreille sheriff’s memo: “The guns mention we are unable to find any trace of them any where.”

  Bamonte wondered why Roston had never been arrested. “Go after him!” he said to himself. By Sonnabend’s account, they had a strong case against the detective: a confession from Logan implicating Roston as his partner; a gun that was traced to the city detective; and the roadblock—two officers who stopped a car driven by Roston about one hour after the killing. A fistful of leads; and yet Bamonte could find no evidence that this Roston had ever been questioned, let alone brought to trial. The files indicated that Logan had gone off to jail on his interstate-theft plea bargain—stealing shoes from a boxcar. Roston had gone … where? Was this behind Elmer Black’s forty-five foot drop from the interstate bridge? Somebody ought to know. But everyone who had been at the meeting on March 3, 1955, was now dead—Charley Sonnabend, Elmer Black, Darrell Holmes, and the Pend Oreille prosecutor, Roy Jones. If Bamonte could have five minutes with any one of those men, he would have asked a single question: Why didn’t you go after Clyde Roston?

  * * *

  WHEN TONY WENT to tell Betty the news of his discovery, she was asleep. He woke her, talking fast.

  “Honey, you’re not going to believe this. Remember I told you about Elmer Black? I found something else—a memo—and it looks like there’s this other guy, Roston, a detective, a real asshole from what it sounds like, and he—”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “No, there’s more. The guy—the guy got away with it. Black probably found out about it. Then he fell off the bridge—or somebody pushed him. I don’t know.”

  Betty was in no mood to talk about ancient crimes. There were more immediate concerns in Metaline Falls—their marriage, for example. Couldn’t he sense the gulf between them? Tony was obsessed with work. He didn’t know when to stop. He never took vacations. He always had been a good provider, but she needed a man who was a full emotional participant. Cops developed calluses, protection from the failures of the heart. This graduate project, which Betty had encouraged, was taking up too many of his extra hours. And now that it was coming alive, it was crowding out the living partner in his life. In the middle of the night, snow rounding out the hard features of the dying town, when Tony wanted to talk about Charley Sonnabend’s deathbed story of 1955, Betty wanted no part of it. Not now. She was worried about their eighteen-year-old son. He had the strong body of Bull Bamonte—he won the school weight-lifting title, breaking the record for his division—and the soft face of Betty. But more and more, what he seemed to have inherited from his father was the emotional fragility.

  A CITIZEN was on the line: somebody had poisoned his horse—he was sure of it—and he wondered what the goddamn sheriff was going to do about it. (The sheriff would send a deputy as soon as he could free one up.) Snow was piling up on the few roads that were passable during winter, which meant more accidents. A county commissioner was on another line, demanding a meeting to go over Bamonte’s latest budget requests. Another citizen called about poachers, two men shooting deer out of season. (Call Fish and Game.)

  Bamonte took his tie off. He usually walked around the office, even during winter, with his shirt sleeves rolled up and the collar open. His office always seemed to be closing in on him—a room stuffed with unzipped files and oddball artifacts. Two pictures were on prominent display inside the sheriff’s office: one was of Chief Joseph, the leader of the Nez Percé, who was said to have died of a broken heart on the Colville Reservation, just west of the Selkirks; the other was a portrait of Geronimo, the Apache leader. Bamonte liked them because they were underdogs who held on to their dignity in the face of failure and retreat.

  A call came in from the local Democratic party. Would Bamonte be attending the fund-raiser in Spokane? A lifetime Democrat in a forest of conspiracy-divining Republicans (a local state legislator introduced a bill in Olympia, the state capital, to outlaw teenage sex, and fluoride in the water supply was still considered evidence of a communist plot to take over the inland Northwest, even as the Cold War came to an end), Bamonte wasn’t sure how much he wanted to do with partisan politics after the debacle of Michael Dukakis.

  A call came in from out of state—a scholar doing research, he said—asking about the Nazis. Somebody was always asking about the Nazis. Bamonte put his feet on the desk and told the short version. He was building a log home in 1975 around Metaline Falls when he met a small, introspective young man from Arizona, Robert J. Mathews, who had just moved to the Pend Oreille from Arizona. Mathews hated the federal government, hated big cities, hated what America had become. He used to lecture his parents about the dangers of the Federal Reserve Board and castigate them for watching television. Bamonte didn’t know much about Mathews when he met him, but he knew a lot about the piece of land he was building on; it was the site of the shoot-out between Black Jack Rowden and a posse half a century earlier.

  Mathews took a job at the cement factory and mostly kept to himself. One day a letter appeared in the Newport Miner, signed by Mathews. In part it said, “Our people have degenerated into some of the most cowardly, sheepish degenerates that have ever littered the face of the earth.” To prove that he wasn’t a coward, Mathews founded the Order, a group of about thirty men, most of them ex-cons or semiliterate drifters, who set out to start a revolution. Following a six-point plan hatched by Mathews, they robbed banks, blew up public buildings, sent hate mail to Jews and blacks, shot and killed a Denver talk-show host, and plotted the assassination of numerous public figures, including former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Fred Silverman, the onetime programming chief of NBC. The Order collapsed after Mathews was killed and most of his followers were convicted of federal racketeering and conspiracy charges. Like Black Jack Rowden, Mathews had died in a shootout with dozens of lawmen.

  Yes, Bamonte told the caller, he knew Robert Mathews fairly well. The neo-Nazi’s mother, who still lived in Metaline Falls, had given Bamonte the last letter she ever received from her son, a note in which he was already casting himself for posterity as a martyr. Bamonte said Mathews was one of those urban rejects looking for the good life in the Pend Oreille, who came in search of the simple rhythms of nature but strayed to the darker impulses of isolation.

  “We used to talk about pileated woodpeckers,” Bamonte said. “Know what a pileated woodpecker is? Lives in tree snags. A beautiful bird. Mathews would spend hours watching ’em. You never think a guy could like animals so much and still have such a grudge against people.”

  AT DUSK, Bamonte slipped out of the office. The sky was pink, the air cold, the Selkirks holding the last blush of alpenglow. The rodeo stands just across the street from the sheriff’s office were stuffed with snow, and its overhang seemed to be sagging.

  Back in Metaline Falls, the main road was clear, snow-plowed by a volunteer. Bamonte wanted to talk to Betty, to apologize for his moods and fits. He also wanted to reach out to their boy. Nobody was home.

  He went to the study, intending to have a quick peek at the graduate project. He removed his shoulder pistol, loosened his collar. The room was cold.

  As he fanned through another stack of documents, a single page jumped out at him; it was written on yellowed paper with the same wobbly type as the 1955 summary. A Pend Oreille officer’s report, it summarized another visit with Sonnabend, in November 1957. In the two years since his first recounting of the 1935 shooting, Sonnabend had clung to life. Back in the hospital, he thought he was down to his last days, and wanted again to tell something about the Conniff case. The doctors had sent him home—perhaps for the final time. There, the big carpenter added a considerable footnote to his earlier revelation.

  The summary was written by Sheriff William Giles, the man Bamonte had defeated in 1
978. It read:

  Pend Oreille County Sheriff

  Officer Report

  Officer: William M. Giles

  Date: 11/19/57

  Received a call from Darrell Holmes, United States Marshal of the Eastern Washington District and he reports that retired Detective Charles F. Sonnabend had some more information regarding the MURDER OF GEORGE CONNIFF.

  I arrived at the Sonnabend home located at 3218 Rosamond Street Spokane, Washington at about 1:00 P.M. and met Mr. Sonnabend and he stated that he had been ill and in the hospital and was due to go back 11/20/57 for an operation.

  Mr. Sonnabend stated that while he was in the hospital he remembered that he had given his nephew a 32 Savage Automatic which was given him at the Spokane Police Dept after the arrest of Acie Logan and Warden Spinks for the burglaries and the theft of an Automobile from Montana.

  Mr. Sonnabend stated that Acie Logan was with Clyde Roston when they went through the police blockade on North Division on the night Conniff was killed. He stated that he had arrested Logan a short time after in a Hotel room in Spokane on a charge of Theft of a car, and upon searching the room he found the gun that was claimed by Logan. The gun a 32 Savage Automatic srl # 40946 was intered on the property cards as Logans gun and that he himself had signed and took possession of the gun after Logan was sent to McNeils Island to serve time.